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Listening to the sustained, rolling laughter at my screening of Pixar's Incredibles 2, it became clear, even while it was happening, which individual scene was likely going to be the best-remembered and most-adored of the bunch: the one with the raccoon.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Documentaries at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and currently sitting with a “100-percent fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the informative, incisive, and moving How to Die in Oregon will be screened at the East Moline Public Library on June 23, a film the Hollywood Reporter called “an affecting profile of the patient aid-in-dying debate.”

There's a kind of directorial smoothness, an almost tangible delight in the composition and pacing of the on-screen images, that keeps audiences alert and energized. Though the films themselves were of varying quality, Steven Soderbergh demonstrated this easy, breezy style in Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen – heist comedies that gleamed with their directors' signature polish. But there's also a kind of smoothness, a professional yet rather paint-by-numbers approach, that can lead to your mind wandering even while you're enjoying yourself.

A movie masterpiece, an Iowa-based photographer, and specialty craft beers will all be on tap when the Figge Art Museum hosts its June 21 Cinema at the Figge presentation, an event sponsored by Ford Photography boasting guest artist Bary Phipps and a screening of Stanley Kubrick's legendary comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Bomb.

As the movie's star has recounted, among the many injuries Johnny Knoxville suffered while filming his new comedy Action Point were concussions, broken bones, and the loss of “two-and-a-half teeth.” Did they happen to be his fangs? I ask because director Tim Kirkby's stunt-filled slapstick, despite its expected R rating, is about as close to a family-friendly Jackass as Knoxville has attempted, and I don't mean that admiringly; even before its famously fearless, possibly deranged lead walked on set, this thing was destined to be toothless.

Walking into Solo: A Star Wars Story, my biggest fear wasn't that it would be bad. It was that it would be terribly disjointed – a sci-fi adventure in which it was painfully obvious which moments were the work of original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the Lego Movie and 21 and 22 Jump Street tyros who were fired well into production) and which were the work of replacement director Ron Howard. Their output, after all, couldn't be more dissimilar: Lord/Miller releases are loose, rambunctious, self-mocking, and sometimes bat-shit crazy; Howard's undertakings, even his comedies and thrillers, are sane, sturdy, earnest, and unsurprising to a fault.

As I recall, there aren't any overt references to the Guardians of the Galaxy in Deadpool 2 – which is kind of astonishing given that the movie's name-dropping antihero verbally side-swipes fellow Marvel figures ranging from Wolverine to Charles Xavier to the Winter Soldier to a certain Avenger MIA from Infinity War. (After momentarily losing his powers of invincibility here, our snarky protagonist dejectedly mutters, “Just give me a bow and arrow and I'm Hawkeye.”) Yet it's nearly impossible not to be reminded of the Guardians flicks while watching director David Leitch's hyper-violent comedy sequel, because if you thought the comic-book adventures of Chris Pratt and company boasted their genre's most ridiculously entertaining song scores, you were right … until now, that is.

The aging-friends comedy Book Club stars Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen as … . I'm sorry, but does it even matter? There are precisely zero circumstances under which I, or really any longtime movie fan, wouldn't want to watch this phenomenal acting quartet together on-screen, even if their material were as insipid as Book Club's keeps threatening to be.

In Life of the Party, Melissa McCarthy plays the doting mother of a college senior who, after being dumped by her husband of 20-plus years, pursues her dream of an archeology degree by enrolling in her daughter's university. I consequently expected 90-odd minutes of campus slapstick as well-meaning, accident-prone, profoundly uncool Mom mortifies her kid in classrooms and at Greek mixers and whatnot – just like the trailers indicated, and just like in the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield hit Back to School. But amazingly, that's not what we get. It turns out that instead of comedic stakes involving a child's embarrassment, there aren't any stakes at all.

Charlize Theron is nearly always great, and few of her movies have needed her to be great quite as much as Tully, a domestic dramedy that only works – to the extent that it works at all – because of the performer's ferocious, at times truly frightening emotional commitment.

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The River Cities' Reader, started in 1993, is independently and locally owned. We publish a monthly printed tabloid size magazine, available for free throughout the Quad Cities at over 300 locations. The Reader provides keys to the Quad Cities' culture in print and online with exhaustive events calendars and coverage of arts, music, theatre, festivals, readings, lectures, meetings, exhibits, museums, dance, sports and classes for all ages. Commentaries on business and politics, locally written theatre and movie reviews, advice columns, astrology, cartoons and crosswords are also published in print monthly, and refreshed weekly, onlinne.